Tramps and vagrants: the disappearance of a class of indigents and down and outs

As background for an upcoming course ¹ I'm reading J F C Harrison’s Early Victorian Britain, 1832–51. Though I should say ‘rereading’, because I first read it in the 1970s when I was doing an evening class on English social history at the Working Men’s College, London (founded by Frederick Denison Maurice in 1854). I have never forgotten Harrison’s book: it is one of those small gems, like Bindoff’s Tudor England, and I find that I am appreciating it even more, some forty–five years later (which I think demonstrates a rare quality of writing, given how often our fond memories seem so flat when revisited!). A particular passage caught my attention, and set me of on writing this piece:

By the 1840s there was a regular body of nomads who frequented the casual wards of the workhouses. The tattered figure of the regular tramp was for many years to come a familiar figure by the English roadside: today [1979] he has all but disappeared . . . That vagrancy was the nursery of crime was accepted as axiomatic: habitual tramps became first beggars, then thieves and finally convicts. Today a beggar is a rare sight in England, and a whole generation has grown up scarcely knowing what the term means. (p60)         

I wondered about this, because although I have scarcely been aware of any people who I would describe as vagrants or as beggars (as ubiquitous, varied, and colourful as they were in the nineteenth century) I have been aware of tramps, from the 1960s up to the second decade of the present century. However, as an historian, Harrison is very careful to warn against making assumptions, and extrapolating ideas from the limited data which is all we have to go on when attempting to make conclusions about times when we were not alive (or even, it might be said, when we are alive—because most of what we think we know is necessarily based on testimony). So what I have to say about tramps relates only to those places I have happened to live in; and what the situation might have been in Bradford, Glasgow, Exeter, or any other place where I have not lived, I cannot possibly say (without at least undertaking the work of a scholar in the field of social history).

I have no recollections of tramps in 1950’s St–Leonards–on–Sea where I was a junior, but I'm fairly sure that they were around. I do remember a sad woman who had St Vitus Dance – a form of chorea – who my father unkindly called “bigger–banger” (as a result of the uncontrollable stamping of her feet on the pavement).

It was not until I lived in Camberwell in the 1960’s that I became fully aware of tramps. I remember that there seemed to be a kind of noontide (of just two or three) of them every day, passing from Brixton to Camberwell Green.² And I'm not sure if my memory serves me correctly, but I remember them as wearing brown great coats, and sporting matted beards. But these people were not criminals – even if occasionally petty thieves. From my observations they simply lacked any energy to put into the work of crime (because crime is a form of work). They were truly lost souls, tramping the streets year in year out. I imagine that they sometimes slept rough and sometimes sought shelter at a Salvation Army hostel (or even a “spike”). These were I think some form of the common lodging houses of Victorian Britain, and still seemed to be around post–ww2—judging at least from a conversation I had with a down and out in Newcastle in 1964³: he involuntarily shuddered when I mentioned the word. But the kind of tramp I'm talking about seemed – perhaps from the 1970s on – to metamorphose into “the homeless” (and in the eyes such people I would occasionally see a terrible despair—whereas in the tramp’s eyes there was nothing to read).

Having moved from London to Cambridge in 1988, I didn’t give much further thought to tramps until I was volunteering one evening at the Cyrenian Centre, giving food to the homeless.⁴ There I met two tramps who (so I felt) were definitely in what I would describe as the “London mould”. One of them told me he had been on the road for thirty years and the other for forty years—though how they could keep track of time it was difficult to say. However, that they had been tramps for an unconscionable time was quite clear; one of them had decidedly lost his sense of reality, and – to borrow a term from pseudo–psychology – was living on a different plane to the rest of us.

My last sighting of my classical “great coated, heavily bearded” tramp was in Hastings in 2013. I was staying in the town because my mother was in hospital. And one evening I decided to look around the town centre. It was during the winter, and was dark—though a fair number of young people were out and about. I came across the tramp in the doorway of a large shop, and just as I reached him he let out an incoherent roar, and scattered a handful of the shop’s leaflets to the four winds. And he was as wild as some creature we might imagine emerging out of the incomprehensible pages of the Book of Ezekiel (or a drawing struck by William Blake as illustration to one of his more obscure imaginings). He was a man tramping over the earth as if it did not belong to him. How lucky we are with our roofs over our heads and our comfortable beds!  

Notes

1/ The course is on art history, but I have a feeling that art – as with so many subjects – cannot be studied in a vacuum.

2/ One winter’s day, when snow was on the streets, I saw a tramp sitting on the wall outside of the house I was living in. I made some sardine sandwiches, and took them down to him. Not a word was said—no word needed saying. Back upstairs I had the satisfaction – pleasure, really – of seeing him eating them. It was such a small thing – a small moment – but I never forget it.

3/ I was in Newcastle, because I’d discovered the pleasure of (the uncertainty of) hitchhiking: where would it take you? I saw more of the north of England than I ever have since. I stayed in Youth Hostels.

4/ I had, as it were, been “roped in” to do this voluntary work. A student from Cambridge University was also there, and she seemed quite frightened by some of the men who turned up. One of them fell into a drunken stupor, and we had to call the police to remove him!       

True Christianity?

   

True Christianity?

(Note: this is not a new blog, but one that I've made some changes to.) 

Even today a person who lives wholly in the present — a person who goes with the flow and is fully committed to life — is spoken of disapprovingly as ‘materialistic’.
A bizarre word…

Don Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity

I have on occasion been “accused” of being an atheist or a materialist—as if I had “magicked up” these words specifically to fling a pot of paint over the sentiments of those who are of any religious persuasion whatsoever. Yet I truly do not want to call myself anything; and I am quite serious when I say that I would like to think of myself as a part of the natural order of things, as much as a blackbird, a squirrel, or what you will—and I found out from Springwatch that we share a remarkable number of genes with the humble worm: 70%. And it is an illusion to think that we are free to believe whatever we like. We can, for example, choose whether to holiday in Berlin, Paris, or Rome. But is that not the limit of (deliberate) human choice? It is true that I may undergo a revelatory experience which is so extraordinarily numinous that I have no choice but to believe that which I feel has been vouchsafed to me. But here equally I have no choice in the matter. So, if someone asks me what I believe, I can only say that I believe that life is a profound mystery; that the question “what is the meaning of life” is not a legitimate one to ask; and if there was a meaning in the sense implied, it would be beyond belief that we have not by now discovered what that was—or why indeed we have been kept in the dark since the dawn of consciousness! ¹ And then, as Loren Eiseley writes, “The why of things eludes us, and as long as this is the case, we will have a yearning for the marvellous, the explosive event in history. Indeed so restless is man's intellect that were he to penetrate to the secrets of the universe tomorrow, the likelihood is that he would grow bored on the day after.”²

“Ah, so that's what it's all about . . . [yawns] . . . anything good on the telly tonight?”

But seriously, I do not yearn after the why of things at all. I think it must all remain a mystery—except occasionally we are vouchsafed some moment of understanding which, alas, we can never explain to anyone else. And what the poets and painters give us is not verisimilitude, but something which is different to the world—and which haunts us with a certain frisson, which we can, if we are so minded, be happy to experience for the rest of our life.  

But to give flesh to the title of this piece: I owe a great debt to Harry Williams,³ and in particular to his book The True Wilderness (comprising sermons given when he was Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the late 1960s). I read that book over and over again, and if I say it changed my life I am not exaggerating (and, like a child totally absorbed by some enchanting story, no solitude was at that time too great for me). In one of William’s sermons he describes a scene from the film, ‘Never on a Sunday’, in which the “Beautiful Ilya . . .  a corrupt, sociable, sensitive, independent, happy-go-lucky streetwalker in the bustling Port of Piraeus” is visited one evening by a young and painfully shy sailor. Effectively he is paralysed by a fear of not knowing what to do—just as we teenagers of the 1950s were crippled with the notion that we had to acquire a ‘technique’ (while being sadly unaware of the kindness and understanding of so many girls and young women). But Ilya is one of those latter, and she softly sings to the sailor, who loses his inhibitions, and . . .  in William’s words, is redeemed. This has nothing to do with morals, and everything to do with the lifting of one of those things that were preventing the young sailor from fulfilling a natural part of his life (and we do not always have such means readily at our disposal).

There is then a Thought for the Day which I will never forget, given by Jon Bell of the Iona Community—and which would not have resonated with me so deeply had I never read Harry Williams. Bell had been visiting a single mother in a Glasgow flat, and he asked: “Morag, how do you manage?” She told him that there was a gay couple in one of the other flats, and that they did shopping and ran other errands for her—and how once a week one of the men would babysit for her, while the other took her dancing. This was true kindness, true charity—freely given, and healthful to all involved. And the man who took her dancing was of course also well able to protect her. And I believe that Christ – as I glean his character from Williams’ interpretation – would have seen this in exactly the same light.

Finally, there is something that I would not relate had I had the slightest intention of effecting a particular result—which was anyway impossible because I was entirely ignorant of the circumstances that obtained. I must explain!

I was attending the last class of a course at Homerton, College, Cambridge, entitled ‘Doing the right thing’ (moral philosophy).⁴ The last thing we discussed was abortion. It’s not something I take lightly, but I abhor the “pro–life”, single issue extremists—those who harass staff at Planed Parenting clinics in America, and have killed at least eleven people since 1993. All I can remember is, that I spoke with sincerity to the effect that it is extremely difficult to form laws in this area, because each case had to be handled with great sensitivity, and that judgement had better take a back seat—or absent itself altogether.

Well, that was that, the class ended, and I made my way to the bus stop. I had hardly reached the stop, when a girl from the class came running after me, calling out my name. She just reached me as my bus pulled up, and we stood for a few seconds simply looking into each other’s eyes, without a word being spoken by either of us. I knew, and she knew that I knew, that at some time she had an abortion, and that at some level she was deeply unhappy about it. And what I said in the class had helped lessen the burden for her—all unbeknown to me. This happy remembrance can still make my eyes water when I recall it.

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1/ I'm a member of a Humanist group, but I am not a Humanist. Which is to say that, I have not read any of the literature put out by Humanists UK, the National Secular Society, or of any other Humanist group or association. (Though I did, way back in the day, read Corliss Lamont’s The Philosophy of Humanism, which I much enjoyed, though without any idea that humanism was anything other than a synonym for a non–believer—in God). Also, I do not believe in proselytising of any kind. It is no business of mine to try and change the mind of anyone else, or to pour scorn on their beliefs (even though my past “copybook” contains some fairly egregious expressions of just this kind). However, I do think that such cults as the Moonies and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are fair game. And if anyone thinks I'm a Nihilist or a Cynic, they’re barking up the wrong tree! There is only one categorisation that I do not particularly mind, which is “freethinker”—which is how my mother had the courage to describe herself on admission to hospital to give birth to me: in the Salvation Army Hospital for Mothers! (Of course, to be a freethinker requires discipline, but it is in no danger of hardening into doctrine—and so freezing the warm stream of thought, so to express it.)

2/  From The Firmament of Time

3/ I do not know who wrote William’s obituary in The Guardian (January, 2006), but the last paragraph reads: “Had he been able to compose his own funeral address, he might, true to form, have taken its theme from Edith Piaf's Je Ne Regrette Rien. But there may be many thousands who regret that we never found the opportunity to tell him how much we owed him, and how much we loved him.” 

A few years ago – travelling to Rye by train – my wife and I found ourselves sitting opposite a man with twinkling eyes, who was wearing a cross which we soon discovered consisted of silver–plated nails recovered from the rubble of the ww2 bombed Coventry Cathedral. The man was travelling with his wife and a small dog to spend time at a retreat in Burwash (also in Sussex). I know that at least two readers of this piece will have guessed the identity of the man! He was the former Bishop of Coventry, the Rt Reverend Simon Barrington–Ward. He was one of the most delightful men that my wife and I have ever met. In the course of our conversation, I told him how much I owed to Harry Williams’ writing and that I wished I’d written to him to express my gratitude. “He’ll know”, he said, “He’ll know.”! 

I was saddened to see from the obituary that Simon Barrington–Ward died just this year. For some years he lived in the same street as us, and we did have the occasional short conversation with him – usually when he was walking his dog – but I'm sure he would not have minded if I’d knocked on his door once, and asked him if we could talk more about Harry Williams—and I have no doubt, many other things. It’s taken the lockdown to show us how much we let go by that would have enriched us if we had lifted our eyes from the pavements. We've had W H Davies, Hazlitt, and Wordsworth to teach us this; and if we haven't learned now, I seriously wonder if we ever will—and a return to supposed “normality” is the least desirable of all possible outcomes. Yet I have hope. I remember some moss which had made happy purchase on a window sill. It dried out one summer, turned brown, and seemed dead. But then it rained for a day or two, and when I next looked it was as verdant as if it had ever been situated by some flowing brook!         

4/  These lessons were given by Dr Russell Re Manning, and they were so inspiring that – after the first evening – we took no further coffee breaks. And at the end of the last class we gave him a spontaneous round of applause.

 

 

Stoicism: notes on a much misunderstood philosophy

The Stoics get a bad press. It is thought that to behave stoicically is to suppress emotions; to face all problems with a stiff upper lip; and generally to live like an anaemic soul, instead of a full–blooded human being.

Hardly could a more oversimplified and misleading view of the teachings of the Stoic philosophers be proposed or entertained. Their analysis of the emotions is one of the subtlest ever proposed, and is scarcely equalled – in terms of its use of reason – until the publication of Kant’s The Moral Law. Further, it’s as valid and strikingly original today as it was in Classical Greece and Rome.

For the Stoics, emotion was not in itself bad, or a thing to be avoided, provided its expression was natural, rather than culturally inculcated. It is a good question to ask, “What constitutes a natural emotion?” Well, consider: if you are brought up in a culture where, on the death of a member of a community it is customary for women to weep and for men to flagellate
themselves, it is surprising that a child, on becoming an adult, will behave in exactly the same way? But is this natural? At the time of the death of Princess Diana, Carol Sarler, writing in the Times identified “a new pornography of grief”, which seemed to grip so many of us following the tragic death of a person with whom we have never exchanged a single word.  

There is some savour in this of the great public exhibitions of grief – accompanied by weeping and lamenting – on the death of European kings in the Middle Ages. Common to the historical and contemporary manifestations of the phenomenon, is the sheer unnaturalness and extravagance of emotion, characterised as it is by a willing public immersion in a sea of collective grief. This passage from Huizinga’s perennial classic The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), wonderfully illustrates the tenor of life in these times:

The frequent processions . . . were a continual source of pious agitation. When the times were evil, as they often were, processions were seen winding along, day after day, for weeks on end. In 1412 daily processions were ordered in Paris, to implore victory for the king, who had taken up the oriflamme against the Armagnacs. They lasted from May to July, and were formed by ever–varying orders and corporations, going always by new roads, and always carrying different relics. The Burgher of Paris calls them “the most touching processions in the memory of men”. People looked on or followed “weeping piteously, with many tears, in great devotion”. All went barefooted and fasting, councillors of Parlement as well as the poorer citizens. Those who could afford it carried a torch or taper. A great many small children were always among them. Poor country people of the environs of Paris came barefooted from afar to join the procession. And nearly every day the rain came down in torrents.  

Was ever there so miserable a picture? I cannot remember all that Huizinga wrote, but I imagine that this encouragement of public mourning and lamentation was a means of keeping the people on side of king and country. But if so, it was cruel policy by any standard, and completely contra to the true spirit of Stoicism.       

But there is another contemporary twin to such imbalance, typified by the kind of extravagant celebration and outpouring of joy that greeted the “triumph” of nomination for the Olympic Games in 2012. “Fever pitch” might be an accurate description of such a state of mind; and its apparent antithesis to the “condition” of public mourning does not rule out a common parentage. But, almost immediately, the pendulum swung the other way—as news first filtered through, and overwhelmed us as we heard of the horrific bombings of tube trains and busses in London on the 7th of July. Our reaction to this was different to that occasioned by the death of Diana (which may perhaps best be described as ersatz). It was, I think, naturally visceral, and truly empathetic towards those who were the innocent victims of these vicious, senseless, and (alas) utterly arbitrary acts of death–dealing, maiming, and traumatising. Nothing good came out of that day. But was not our deep–felt, but quieter reaction to this tragedy more natural?

In the light of the above examples, it is hardly surprising that the Stoics warned of the dangers of excessive emotion: such as occur as a result of socially inculcated (or learned) reactions to events, which have probably become second nature, but which loom out of all proportion, thereby causing an incapacitating disturbance of the mind. “A push may start a log rolling, but the reason it rolls is because it is round.”¹ Likewise, unhealthy emotions are pent up – or primed – such that the smallest incident may unleash them (often with disastrous results, such as are reported daily in the news). So, consider, would it be appropriate for a judge to feel anger when sentencing someone who had committed a heinous act? No; the judge may feel opprobrium – at some stages of the trial – and this may be an unavoidable response; but that natural emotional response will not determine the length of the sentence handed down. Nor will judges carry over such responses to their next case: otherwise they would be unfitted to concentrate on the matter in hand, and might even pass down a harsher sentence (reflective not of the facts of the case, but of the emotional state of their mind).

For the Stoic, high spirits were lauded; pleasures enjoyed – as they came along in the natural course of events; and, as Cicero said, it would be madness not to pursue something that you feel would be good for you. What the Stoics were against was excessive yearning; corrosive envy or bitterness; grief so deeply felt and long extended that a lost friend would be miserable were they able to witness it; ambition which, if unrealised, would seem unbearable; and any emotion which went beyond what was either natural or desirable (to the person who was clear–eyed about the things that really matter). However, to be a Stoic did not mean that you should not try for high office.  For example, Marcus Aurelius (an exemplary Stoic) became emperor. But, for the Stoic, such positions were regarded as “preferred indifferents”, which if not fulfilled would not cause them to become bitter, envious, or irascible (or indulge in any other form self–defeating response).

So, for the Stoics emotions are natural and necessary for a life worth living. But they would endeavour not to be carried away on an emotional tide so strong that it bordered on madness. And if you want to see the results of emotions out of control and generally wreaking havoc, you need do no more that watch Coronation Street, East Enders, or Hollyoaks; and then ask yourself, “Is this the way I really want to live?”

Suppose though that everyone lived the more rational – though still high–spirited, explorative, and risk–ready – life of a Stoic? Would this mean the death of literature – because of an insufficiency of drama in people’s lives? No; this will never happen, because irrationality and illogicality flow like ichors though the minds of multitudes! So we need fear no loss of such plays and novels as Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, King Lear, Madam Bovary, The Clockwork Orange, or The Handmaid’s Tale. And then Seneca’s Medea is as tragic a play as anyone could ask for.

End note:

Stoic thought sometimes seems to turn our normal way of viewing things on their head. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero writes “. . . as compassion is distress due to a neighbour’s misfortunes, so envy is distress due to a neighbour’s prosperity. Therefore, the man who comes to feel compassion comes also to feel envy.” How can compassion be put on the same footing as envy? This is made clearer later in the same disputation: “It is urged . . . that it is useful to feel rivalry, to feel envy, to feel pity. Why pity rather than give assistance if one can? Or are we unable to be open–handed without pity? We are able, for we ought not to share distresses ourselves for the sake of others, but we ought to relive others of their distress if we can.” I take it from this that if we feel compassion or pity, we had better turn these emotions into action, otherwise they will become unhealthy, and shrivel into some kind of absurd, useless luxury. And if we find ourselves envying our neighbour, then we had better turn to Emerson: “There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

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¹ This sentence is from Professor Margaret Graver’s Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 (Translated and with Commentary). Chicago, 2002. I could not have written this piece without that book. The Introduction and Commentary are written with great clarity; and the translation reads wonderfully (it is not necessary to know Latin to appreciate this).

My grandfather, my step–grandmother (and Dickens & Nelson)

Joe, his wife, Lily, and his sister (also Lily)

and an unknown clerical gentleman

I have recently rediscovered some of the letters that my grandfather sent to my father, and these have more than family interest. Here first is an insight into London schooling in the late nineteenth century. (My grandfather left school in 1899. The family lived in Bermondsey, close to Tower Bridge). I have transcribed the letters into Courier New—a font which is an aesthetic insult to typography, and which I think has no other use than to reproduce the results of the typewriter:

I remember full well, that I left school on my 13th birthday, and the master told my mother, that I was a bright boy, but oh so lazy!  Of course it was very fortunate that I discovered what ignorance meant as soon almost as I stepped out of the school ground.  Of course one can never really make up for lost time.  But then one has to remember that the old London Board School never set out to make scholars.  As long as simple arithmetic and elementary spelling were assimilated, the job was done. Believe it or not though, I did not even get that far.

I have since made attempts amongst other things, to acquire a smattering of Latin, but with no success.  Fortunately I took interest in the French language, and this gave me my chance on the Continental. [Attending Railway Union conferences in Belinzona, Switzerland]

My grandfather did indeed learn French, and I am sure many other things at evening classes. I don’t think that he ever read Samuel Smiles’ Self Help, but he definitely embraced the ethos of Victorian self–improvement. His father was a goods–yard shunter on the railways, and Joe started off as a signal clerk. He worked his way up gradually, and eventually became manager of the Bricklayers Arms Goods Depot in south London. The depot was one of the largest in the country, and of vital importance during WW2. Consequently it was extensively bombed and at times not too far removed from war–front conditions. Post–war Joe worked in railway offices at Victoria Station.

My (paternal) grandmother died before I was born; and Joe remarried. He met his second wife as a result of involvement with the Labour Party. Joe was a keen unionist, and his second wife (Joy) was what used to be called a ‘silver spoon socialist’. She was a member of the Cecil family, and her father owned much of the land around the village of Bletchingley, Surrey – that is until he successfully managed to gamble most of it away . . . However, Joy was a truly committed Labour Party member and was re–elected as Labour candidate for the Rural District of Godstone & Parish of Bletchingley, Surrey – in the very heart of Conservative country – year after year. That was because people knew that   she cared – and indeed she would willingly turn out in the middle of the night to help someone. During Neil Kinnock’s leadership of the Labour Party she was given one of two annually awarded Kier Hardy prizes for outstanding local political activity. Their marriage was amazing in a way: Joe from the working class roots, and Joy from the upper or ‘landed’ classes. Further, Joe was twenty years older than Joy. Nevertheless, it worked wonderfully. Joe became quite the squire in a way – in Bletchingley – and I remember one Christmas his giving the post–boy a half crown. This was a gesture of genuine kindness, but also I think a demonstration of Joe’s standing in the community!  Joe’s letter continues:   

I am left with the impression that grandfather Hart was about twenty years older than grandma, in which case he would have been born about 1807. He seemed to have suffered from continuous ill health, which having no private means, caused the family some financial hardship. I learned that he was at one time a news reporter for a journal called “The South London Press”. He probably did some clerical work in the City of London. When he was alive, the family had a small house in South London near the Church of St George. –This is “Little Dorrit’s” church of Charles Dickens fame. (I have seen many of your soldiers visiting the church during the war)* The church was known as St George in the Fields when it was built. The district was bombed, but the church escaped serious damage.

Grandma Hart always referred to grandfather as “poor Hart” They appear to have lived quite happily together. It might be asked why  I did not fill in further details from my father or aunts. I suppose the short answer would be that as I grew older, my interest diminished.

On looking back I think it should be noted with some interest that both grandparents could read and write, which considering the state educational facilities of the early part of the last century, marks them as being a little above the average.  As a child I was very fond of Dickens (and I still am) and when talking with me [sic] to grandma about a copy of Pickwick Papers which I had just received from a library, she remembered when it came out first, in weekly parts, and how “poor hart” [as grandma Hart always referred to grandfather] purchased a copy on the day of issue, and with what zest they both enjoyed reading it.  One of my boyhood heroes was Nelson, and you can imagine how widely I opened my eyes when grandma told me that she knew and had spoken with a man who had fought in Trafalgar under Nelson.  Another was George Stephenson, the power behind the steam locomotive, and it was a wonder to me how grandma could possibly got [sic] before there were railways!  From this starting point I elicited the information that when she first came to London, it was from the White Hart Inn at Lewes [Sussex], that she started by stage coach from about the year 1839.  Apparently, as was not unusual, she left the village to take service in London as a girl of eleven or twelve, but in what capacity or where, history is silent.  

  Great grandfather Mabbott held some sort of semi official office with the Lewes Town Council. At one time he was Town Crier. This would require him to wear the gold braided cocked hat and cloak, and after ringing his bell on the steps of the old town hall, and calling “Oyez, Oyez” proceed to read to [sic] councils notices and proclamations, followed by personal notices of things lost and found, and announcements. . .[I do not have the next page]    

Joy, my step–grandmother, taken 

before she met my (paternal) 

grandfather

 





  

Joe and Joy at Little Coldharbour, near Bletchingley, Surrey. Probably taken in the early 1950s, or possibly in the late 1940s. It is perfectly clear how happy they were – former working class boy from Bermondsey, and former member of the Cecil family! I was lucky enough to spend holidays with them—and never was boy so happy!

                                  

*This reference to the war is puzzling. It is true that London was bombed during the First World War, but not nearly as extensively as during the Second World War. But I imagine that Joe still knew this area as a result of his work at the Bricklayers Arms goods depot.

Freud, the unconscious, Fliess, and Emma Eckstein: some observations

The pleasures of interpretation are ... linked to loss and disappointment, so that most of us will find the task too hard, or simply repugnant; and then, abandoning meaning, we slip back into the old comfortable fictions of transparency, the single sense, the truth.                                                                                                                                                 Frank Kermode

Freud and Fliess

During the last academic year I attended a first year undergraduate level course on English literature (university extramural). During the Easter term, when we were studying Neo–Classical and Romantic poetry, our tutor asked us – in what context I cannot now remember – how many of us believed in the unconscious. A few students raised their hands almost immediately; most made a gesture indicative of considerable uncertainty; and I remarked that I had read Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. (Harper Collins, 1995). To which our tutor quipped that someone ought to write Why Webster was Wrong. (A fair question, perhaps, yet in twenty–four years no one has attempted this! However, Webster is so painstakingly fair to Freud, and has written such a finely argued case, that the critic would hardly know where to begin: she or he would have to devote themselves to a kind of obscure metalanguage, such as would blind the reader in the manner of Freud.)  However this may be, this small classroom interlude set me thinking again about the – often bitter and acrimonious – disputes over the existence (or otherwise) of the unconscious (and it is hard sometimes to understand exactly why this controversy generates so much heat).

I first read Freud in my mid–twenties—starting with the Introductory Lectures, and following these up with Civilisation and its Discontents. I was enchanted and stimulated—here were ideas I had never encountered before (with the added bonus of Freud’s fine literary style.) But, when I moved on to other works I quickly discovered what I regard as one of Freud’s major faults: he writes as if what he says is axiomatically true—that is, obviously true and therefore not needing to be proved. Far from presenting us with the closely argued conclusions of a Darwin, based on the profound examination of ‘a million facts’, and indefatigable travel to foreign climes – Freud based his analyses upon observations gleaned from an extremely narrow (and well–healed) strata of Viennese society. From these observations he built theories which to me seem to me fantastic—that is, quasi–chimerical.

For the purposes of this critical piece I have just read Freud’s The Unconscious, in the new translation by Graham Frankland, with an introduction by Mark Cousins (Penguin, 2005). Here is a section from I In defence of the Unconscious (p52):

To postulate an unconscious is . . . entirely legitimate in that, by doing so, we do not depart in the slightest from our customary way of thinking, widely held to be correct.

Freud’s emphasis on the word ‘legitimate’ indicates, I think, a fairly deep lack of confidence in the idea he is about to postulate; while his assertion that, ‘we do not depart from our customary way of thinking, begs the question, who’s customary way of thinking? The gullible reader can here be fooled into thinking it axiomatic that there exists a considerable body of ‘wise’ people who really do concur with Freud’s ‘customary way of thinking.’ We then learn that this ‘way of thinking’ is ‘widely held to be correct.’ Again, we have to ask, ‘widely held to

be correct by whom?’ However, this apart, for an idea to be (putatively) ‘widely held to be correct’ is not a sufficient reason for believing it to be true—in fact it is a very good reason for treating it with extreme scepticism. The popular ‘weathervane’ often points in a direction quite indiscernible to the meteorologist.

What though of the unconscious? Of what does it consist? Can it even be said exactly to consist of anything?—material, that is. What is its purpose? How does it operate? These are hard questions, to which moreover there seem to be no satisfactory answers—so far at least. Certainly we cannot locate it physically, as we can the cerebral cortex. Not that this is a legitimate reason for saying that no such entity exists. Because if the unconscious is a function of the mind – as opposed to the brain – then that cannot be physically located either.

I think that there is one thing to bear clearly in mind. Which is, that the elusive (and putative) unconscious is not to be found in any part of the brain that we would call physical (and I assume that there is no part of the brain that we could describe as non physical?). However, it should be noted here that Freud wrote, ‘Provisionally, our psychic typography has nothing to do with anatomy; it refers not to anatomical localities, but to regions in the psychic apparatus, wherever these may be situated in the body.’ [Webster’s italics]. The unconscious: II The ambiguity of the unconscious (p57). So, it seems we must assume that there is some free floating ‘psychic apparatus’ which lacks a known anatomical locality (and doubtless still does). I make no further comment on this.

I’ll continue by outlining what I think is the most widely held conception of the unconscious. Which is that it is the repository of primal emotions or drives, such as are too frightening – perhaps even, terrifying? — for subjects (people) to express or act upon. For example, someone who is cripplingly shy in society may repress this perfectly healthy need, by – as it were – channelling it into the unconscious (by some kind of mechanism which even Freud seems never to have satisfactorily explained). Once repressed, these primal or natural needs or emotions cause havoc, and are likely to re-emerge in the form of extremely unhealthy emotions, bizarre character traits, or even mental illness. There is much to be said for this. It is very plausible, and could well be true at a subconscious level. Probably most of us know of at least one person who has made their life a misery because of their lack of courage in expressing natural and healthy emotions—and I think we all know of people who have manifested envy or jealousy to such a degree that it has vitiated our relationship with them. However, it should be borne in mind that Freud regarded the unconscious as ‘A seething mass of unclean impulses.’ Richard Webster, publication as cited in the first paragraph. I find this a very curious notion. And if it is true we might wonder what hope there is for any of us. (The writer, Vincent Brome, once said to me that life for everyone was more difficult than it might have been if evolution had not taken so many ‘inefficient’ turns).  

However, if we remain theoretically wedded to the unconscious as our ‘working hypothesis’, then considerable problems remain. According to Freud, ‘the unconscious is permanently locked into its own priority,’ and has a strong indifference to anything outside it own

satisfaction.’ The Unconscious: Introduction. Mark Cousin’s words. (pxvi).  So, are we to infer from this that there is some kind of ‘being’, which does have a consciousness—and moreover of a deeply unpleasant character? And how can an unconscious be conscious of itself?

But what in Freud’s view is the complex relationship of the unconscious to the conscious? I could paraphrase this, but I’m not sure I could capture the strangeness of it, so I am going to quote Freud’s own words:

Moving to a positive [sic] account of psychoanalytic findings, we can state that a psychic act generally goes through two phases, between which is interposed a kind of inspection (censorship). In the first phase the act is unconscious and belongs to the unconscious system. If, on being inspected, it is rejected by the censorship, it is not allowed to proceed to the second phase;                                it is then said to be ‘repressed’ and has to remain unconscious. If, however, it passes the inspection, it enters a second phase and becomes part of the system we are calling the conscious. The fact that it belongs to this system does not however, definitively determine its relationship to consciousness. It is still not conscious, though it certainly is capable of consciousness . . . i.e., certain conditions being met, it can now become the object of consciousness without any particular                 resistance. The Unconscious: II The Ambiguity of the Term ‘Unconscious’ and the Typographical Perspective. (p56)

Here we have posited a censor: something which might be described as ‘The great decider of our fate.’ (If not Milton’s ‘. . . two-handed engine at the door’, which ‘Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.’) However that may be, we will remember that the unconscious ‘is permanently locked into its own priority’, and has a ‘stony indifference to anything outside its own satisfaction.’ However, as far as I am aware, only humans are capable of evincing a stony indifference to anything (and you cannot even say that a cat or a dog is capable of feeling satisfaction in the way that humans can). So I would suggest that Freud is (subconsciously) attributing human characteristics to his (highly illusive) unconscious. This is bizarre. Moreover, for the unconscious to perform its putative tasks, it is hardly sufficient to allocate it some limited form of consciousness, such as animals have—in fact I would suggest that it would necessarily require a consciousness consonant with that of a fully conscious person. How else could it perform its mighty task? And, how it might turn upon itself in order to mutate between its two mutually exclusive states is a riddle of riddles.

With regard to the censorship – requiring a ‘psychic act’ to pass a ‘customs post’ if it wishes to move from the murky waters of the unconscious to the sunny uplands of consciousness – Sartre has a very trenchant criticism of this supposed process—which I will have to paraphrase, as I do not have the text to hand (and of course I may not remember it accurately). As I remember, Sartre writes that if you are going to have a censor, then effectively you are setting up a ‘passport control’, which in turn requires a passport officer, whose job it is to decide what (and when) certain ‘psychic’ material may be allowed to pass. It would work on our behalf, but without our being aware of it. And – I would suggest – would necessarily have

to be conscious in order to deal efficiently and fairly with matters of great consequence to the person it was serving. Whatever may be the case, we are, I think, in the world of Alice in Wonderland. We have posited it would seem three consciousnesses: 1/ The logically impossible consciousness of the unconscious; 2/ The consciousness of the customs officer or passport controller; and 3/ Normal consciousness. Yet I do not think it necessary to think in terms of a – or the – unconscious at all. I think that subconsciousness is sufficient for the purpose in hand. And I cannot help but think that ‘raising the unconscious’ has certain religious overtones (of equal improbability). But there is another point: for psychic material to be unconscious does not require it to be ‘stored’ in a specific place. And to see the unconscious as a ‘thing’ can only, I think, cause great confusion. This strange ‘entity’ tends to lurk at the back of people’s minds as some actual – but entirely indefinable – dark ‘space.’ Just as the idea of hell – formless but fearful – darkened the lives of so many people in the past (and in the present, for those whose society has them in the grip of generational culture). So there we have it—controversy has raged over the nature, properties, and ‘intentions’ even of something which is quite simply not susceptible of proof. (However it is not illegitimate to believe in things that you cannot prove.

But we do not need the unconscious in order for Freud to be right in so much of his thinking.   It is perfectly obvious that we are only too good at deceiving ourselves; of acting – or not acting – from cowardice; of failing to face up to the truth about ourselves (as those businessmen and bankers who admit to having made ‘mistakes’ in the past, when their behaviour has been downright criminal). These and many other things we must accept to be true, but do we really need all the fantastic ‘apparatus’ of Freud in order to understand these things? The Ego, the Id, the Superego, the census, ‘psychic acts’, and etc. are so much obscuring baggage that we seem hardly able to see over the top of them. I leave that as an open question, but meantime intend to look at some other character traits of Freud that seem almost to be peculiar to him.

I have so far examined — primarily – Freud’s theory of the unconscious. But, when reading Richard Webster, I came across an aspect of Freud’s behaviour which I can only describe as highly (almost criminally) irresponsible, and deeply shameful. As a result of the ‘treatment’ carried out, the patient came within a hair’s breadth of dying; and was even so left permanently scarred. To set the scene: in 1887 Freud met Willhelm Fliess, to whom he immediately warmed, and with whom he kept up a long correspondence (which he later strenuously – but unsuccessfully – tried to keep out of the public domain). Freud’s fascination with Fliess has never been satisfactorily explained, but if we are to go by Richard Webster’s account, it is tantamount to being inexplicable. Webster writes that:

[Freud’s] letters to Fliess . . . show a man who, rather than inspiring awe in others, appears both fallible and credulous. For Freud frequently adopts towards Fleiss attitude of reverence and submission, and looks to his younger colleague at almost every stage for guidance, advice, and scientific enlightenment.

                                                                                                                                                                    Freud’s attitude towards Fliess was all the more significant in view of the ideas which the Berlin physician was committed to. For although Fliess began his career as an orthodox nose and throat specialist, he soon stepped into a self–created labyrinth of medical error which led him to formulate some of the most remarkable theories in the whole of nineteenth–century medicine. Why Freud was Wrong, Chapter ten, Freud, Fleiss and the Theory of Infantile Sexuality. (p220)

This insight into Fleiss’s personality and ideas is essential to the part he played in assisting Freud with his treatment of a patient (analysand) – Emma Eckstein – who was highly disturbed by her practice of masturbation (a practice which even Freud could not happily square with his personal life). (Fliess here enters the picture as the author of a book, The Relationship between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs (1897)—described by one reviewer as, ‘utter gobbledegook!’)

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In 1895, after having apparently identified Eckstein as a victim of nasal reflex  neurosis, brought on by masturbation, Freud summoned Fliess to Vienna to perform the ultimate operation which he advocated — the removal of the turbinate bone in Emma Eckstein’s nose. Fliess was an inexperienced surgeon and this was apparently one of his first ventures into major surgery. Webster (p224).     

Fliess then returned to Berlin, but Emma Eckstein’s condition deteriorated rapidly. She suffered from ‘a purulent secretion, massive haemorrhaging, and considerable pain.’ Freud called in another surgeon, Ignaz Rosanes. In Freud’s words they removed ‘at least half a metre of gauze from the cavity [of the sight of the operation]. The next moment came a flood of blood. The patient turned white, her eyes bulged, and she had no pulse.’ Quoted Webster (p224).  Webster continues:

After the cavity had been packed the bleeding stopped and Emma Eckstein made a partial recovery. But she continued to have severe haemorrhages. Instead of facing up to the fact that he had damaged his patient’s health and almost caused her death through an entirely unecessary operation, Freud tried to exculpate both himself and Fliess by arguing that her haemorrhaging was actually hysterical, and was motivated by an unconscious wish to ‘entice’ Freud to her bedside. Instead of  revising his estimations of Fliess in the light of this experience, Freud elevated him even higher in his regard, describing him as a true healer, ‘the type of man into whose hands one confidently puts one’s life and that of one’s family.’ Webster (pp224 –5)

If this is not a form of insanity, then it is hard to imagine what is. We may attribute to Freud’s character the title of Anthony Trollope novel, He Knew he was Right (even when he knew he was wrong). The idea of Keats’ ‘Negative Capability’ or Popper’s ‘defeasibility’ would, I think, have been anathema to him.

So is there nothing to be salvaged from this unconscionable obscurantism and psychic mess of pottage? Yes, I think that there is. We may probably reasonably say that Chaucer and Shakespeare knew more about human nature than Freud did. But I think that it took Freud to ‘fire the psychological pistol’, and make us more vividly aware of the way we humans only too willingly pull the wool over our eyes; with what anger we tend to react to criticism; what disgraceful thoughts we are capable of entertaining; the bitterness we can nurse; the pleasure we can sometimes take in hurting others; and of course all those terrible aspects of the human psyche that lead to murder, torture, rape, sexual abuse, and other horrors—‘A seething mass of unclean impulses,’ indeed (not that our souls can be made up only of such things). However, the idea that these terrible emotions are perhaps latent in us all, but have not manifested themselves because we have not found ourselves in situations which might have sparked them, is – to say the very least – a sobering thought. And yet, decency tends to prevail, and if so many of us did not get so truly upset when some tragedy strikes, we might feel like giving up all hope.

I have often thought that Freud would have been of inestimable service to us if he had been content to catalogue his often acute observations of human behaviour. In the manner, as might be said, of Peter and Iona Opie’s The Lore and Language of School Children. Here, for example, are two observations: one from Civilisation and its Discontents, and another which I will have to quote from memory, both of which I have not forgotten in decades:

We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only      very little from the condition itself.

We must learn to accept the fact of complicated relationships.

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I will, at this point, explain why I think I am putting so much effort into this piece—and Freud would not have been slow in pulling me up with this! It would for him be a classic case of denial—of his theories and of psychoanalysis. This is a trick ever up the Freudian’s sleeve: that which you deny is that which you unconsciously believe. It is a happy device to have at hand.